


Reconsideration

by rattyjol



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2015-07-05
Packaged: 2018-04-07 17:48:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4272387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rattyjol/pseuds/rattyjol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Mary, the world opens up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reconsideration

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by samparker at comment_fic LJ: [Torchwood, Tosh/OFC, date night.](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/546351.html?thread=77369391#t77369391)

After Mary, the world opens up.

She's already subscribed to two online dating sites, her profiles mostly empty, and when she changes 'men' to 'men and women' it's like she's finally acknowledging a part of herself that hadn't been denied, exactly, she'd just never really taken the time to think.

She's never had much luck with men, but women are somehow simpler, easier. She goes on dates— even second, third, fourth dates— and once, when she is feeling particularly brave, and particularly tipsy, she approaches a woman in a bar. The woman is straight, but lets her down easy, and Tosh retreats not nearly as mortified as she could have been.

And then there's Sayuri.

Sayuri is finishing her master's in engineering. They meet in a coffee shop and talk numbers, soaring ideas for programs and structures probably a century, two centuries into humanity's future. Tosh has to bite her tongue about some of the things she's seen. They go back to Sayuri's tiny student apartment and spread butcher paper over the floor and start to map out the basic principles of using Earth's gravitational pull to slingshot things out into space. Someone brings up Farscape and Sayuri asks if she believes in aliens and Tosh can feel all her secrets bubbling up behind her lips so she does the only thing she can do and kisses her.

When Tosh is called in to work the next day she worries she'll be distracted, that her fingers will be itching towards her phone to tell Sayuri about the latest equation she's just figured out how to solve, but her head is clearer than ever and the case is closed without a hitch. They stay up half the night talking about time travel and fall asleep on the couch.

Tosh reads over Sayuri's thesis and thinks of a dozen new ideas and Sayuri has to rewrite half the paper. Sayuri helps Tosh brush up on her Japanese, which has gotten rusty, and Tosh helps Sayuri sound a little less like a walking academic paper when she speaks English. She wakes up every day with a hundred new ideas and goes to bed every night with a thousand more, and her brain has never moved this fast or this clearly or this— anything.

But Torchwood hangs between them like an inevitable fog, and when Sayuri's student visa expires and she goes home to Japan after graduation, it's remarkably easy to say goodbye.

She'd thought Mary had opened up the world for her, but she had nothing on Sayuri.


End file.
